Tempering & Molding Chocolate - 5 Easter Candies in 5 Days

Candies can seem like a foreign substance to home cooks -- delicious, sugary concoctions that might have been whipped up by a magician. Hard, soft, chewy, tart, sweet, opaque or translucent, the incredible variety of shapes, sizes, flavors and textures can seem both unreal and a little intimidating, especially with Easter candy. Chocolate eggs that mimic real ones? That's gotta be magic.

The thing is -- while it seems other-worldly, candy making is perfectly within anyone's grasp. You can make almost any candy you conceive of with just a little time, patience, perseverance and creativity -- and Easter is the perfect time to start! That being said, a lot of candy recipes make it all seem deceptively easy, as if candy making is as simple as making a sandwich or whipping up a pie. Some really are that easy, but some are more on the scale of delicate art.

To start you on the path towards becoming a candy-making dynamo, I'm going to spend the week sharing Easter recipes with you. All have been filtered through me -- a woman who hasn't made candy since childhood.

After an uphill battle, I've filtered out the hassles and now have five candies that can make Easter all the sweeter. First up: Molding chocolate into tasty little candies.

Chocolate candies:

It seems simple enough -- melt chocolate, pour in a mold and allow to cool. But oh no, there's more to it. By melting regular chocolate you've un-tempered it, causing candies to melt in your hands when you pick them up.

So you have two choices, which is why we're listing these candies first:

1. Temper your chocolate before molding it.
2. Use candy melts that don't need to be tempered.

The advantage of option one is that you can use any sort of chocolate, fancy or plain, dark or light, from almost any store. Candy melts, on the other hand, don't need to be tempered, and come in a variety of colors but are only available at specialty stores.

What is tempering? It's the process that makes chocolate shiny, crisp and tough enough to rest in your hand without melting in a millisecond (which, for us, would cause a real temper tantrum). Tempering involves bringing chocolate to a high temperature (about 115 F), cooling it to warm (low-80s) and finally bringing it up just a wee bit (88-91 F). From there the chocolate can be poured into molds.

A myriad of Web sites and techniques explain the intricacies of tempering. I used David Leibovitz's technique for these bunnies but there's also Baking 911, Cooking for Engineers and a million other Google-able sites.

So choose your chocolate, read through the directions and in no time you'll have your own tasty treats. These bunnies are just the first of five adorably delicious treats headed your way this week.

My tips after using the Leibovitz technique:

Cooling chocolate won't happen instantly. It takes work and time.

Different chocolates have different tempering points. Dark has the highest and white the lowest.

Happily enough, you can re-temper chocolate if you mess up the first time.

A candy thermometer is a necessity for the newbie. Pros can temper by look and texture, but there's no reason to tempt fate when you're just starting off.

A double-boiler is needed unless a microwave is available, but cooks can be also use a plain ol' metal bowl.

Molds make candy-making easy. Plunk down a few bucks for cheap plastic ones at the baking store; they worked just fine for me.

And finally, even if your attempts to temper end in a tantrum, the chocolate will hold in the fridge. Just don't let it get hot -- i.e. eat it quickly! See, no matter how you go about it, you'll win in the end.